HUMANITY IS ANOTHER CORPOREITY ANIMAL AND HUMAN BODIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MERLEAU-PONTY

This article focuses on the question of anthropological difference and animal-human relations from the perspective of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Through an in-depth analysis of corporeity Merleau-Ponty discovers and valorizes a common ontological ground between human beings and animals: far from being reducible to a mere machine, the body tells us something about animals, about us, and, finally, about our mutual interrelationships. What does it mean to be a body, a body that acts, inhabits a meaningful space, and expresses something? Animals and human beings share a corporeity that constitutes their openness to the world and it is in the light of this continuity that Merleau-Ponty was able to find a new kind of relation, "an overcoming that does not abolish the kinship". An original notion of difference appears here, a notion that valorizes the specificity of each etre-au-monde without becoming an ontological gap. A human being thus is not an animal plus something more, but rather another corporeity.